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Thursday, November 17, 2011

CAPSULE REVIEW: The Visitor (1979)

What on earth were the filmmakers responsible for The Visitor
thinking? Most of the time it seems like they were going for a
straightforward telekinetic evil kid movie, and if it wasn’t for the
intermittent exposition, you’d probably just fill in the gaps on your
own and call it a day. Instead, thanks to the extended cut 35mm print
unearthed by the guys at Cinema Overdrive,
we get an opening scene where a soft-focus hippie space-alien Jesus
tells a story about an evil being named “Sateen” to a bunch of bald
kids… There’s a lot to like in the next hour and a half, including the
surprisingly effective performance of the young Paige Conner, whose
intermittent Southern drawl adds just enough creepiness to her lines at
just the right time. You also get exploding basketballs, flocks of angry
birds, Lance Henrickson (better known as Bishop from Aliens), a
couple of moments of absurdly sped-up car crashes and ice-rink carnage,
and a surreal cameo by Sam Peckinpah in which he’s entirely dubbed and
not at all sober. The Italians tend to be good at throwing traditional
narrative logic out the window, but unfortunately this one is never
quite able to establish a coherent mood. Despite director Giulio
Paradisi’s tangential connection to Fellini (he was a bit actor in 8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita), none of the master’s technique seemed to stick. The Visitor is
worth seeing for its surreal and unsettlingly assembled scare scenes,
and is a pretty fun and unpredictable supernatural horror flick.